In this segment of the Martech Minute video blog, we speak with Vinay Singhal, co-founder and CEO of WittyFeed.  Just a few short years ago, Vinay and his co-founders put a unique spin on publishing and monetizing viral online content, and from those humble beginnings they built WittyFeed into one of the world’s most popular viral content platforms. Watch this interview to learn how they did it!

Colin White: Thanks everybody for joining us, this is Colin White from Martekrs with another segment of the Martech Minute. Today I’m pleased to be joined by Vinay Singhal, he’s the co-founder and CEO of WittyFeed. Thanks for joining us Vinay!

Vinay Singhal: Thanks for having me Colin!

Colin White: WittyFeed has been called the fastest growing content company on the globe, so tell us a little bit about what WittyFeed is, and how you founded it?

Vinay Singhal: Yeah so it’s a three and a half year welcome, we started in September 2014, and if you go a little further back in 2012 we started with a Facebook page. And the Facebook page came from a very core belief as a person that I have, is that we probably live in the best times of human civilization. People used to go to war just to make their living out of it, and you know being a soldier used to be one the best jobs. And today there are more people who die out of overeating than hunger. So I have always believed that the world has more positive to offer then negative. So it’s just that the negativity and fear are more viral than anything else. It’s fed faster and is so real-time. The world is so real-time today that everything becomes such a big issue.

So we started this Facebook page called “Amazing Things in the World,” and the idea was very simple: we wanted to bring out the positive to the world. We wanted to give people something to look forward to every day., and it seems like the idea caught on very well. Within first six months we had more than a million followers on that Facebook page, and a huge amount of traction back in 2012. That was my first ever introduction to the world of social media, in content.

I am an engineer by education, and so are the other two co-founders that I have, and so we realize that content is probably the way to make the best impact at scale, if you really want to impact real human lives. I think that’s where it all started for us. And so basically I have always believed that businesses are about creation of wealth not the destruction of it, and so I have never believed in the whole funding part of a deal, you know, just take some money and burn it. I come from a lower middle-class family in India and my father used to run a small general store in the village. And he always told me if the shop doesn’t make you money there is no point of having it. So my business understanding is that the business has to sustain itself and then grow from there.

So we had a Facebook page with a million followers. But how do we make money out of this? It has to sustain itself if you want to do this for a long time. So that’s when we decided to set up a website. We started to create content on the website, and put up some ads from Google and all those guys, and started to drive referral traffic from the content that we were creating on the website. Now we were doing all right. As all of this was happening, I was still in college, and by the time we graduated we were making enough money.

But we asked one simple question to ourselves: how do we scale this? And that is when the answer came, there are so many Facebook pages, there are so many of these communities and these people who are passionate about building these communities. But they don’t know how to monetize those communities. Which is when we figured out that what if whatever we have done for ourselves – the website, the content, the technology, the infrastructure, the ads, everything – if we could package this into a product and give it to everybody who had a community, now their life could be simpler. They could just take content and share it, and we would simply do a revenue share with them.

We were literally the first ones to do it in the right way. The only company was doing it before us was MyLikes, who were publishing mostly shady content. And we did this in September 2014, which is what became WittyFeed. Today that platform has more than 35,000 communities across the world, across different platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, all different platforms. And there are 120 million unique users on our platform every month all across the world.

Colin White: So when you talk about communities, that’s the Viral9 influencer program?

Vinay Singhal: Yes, because there were two different problems we were solving. Viral9 was solving a problem for communities and WittyFeed was basically the media face of it. So we kept these as two different platforms so that we could focus them properly. Viral9 is all about influencers. Viral9 is all about distribution of content and technology where WittyFeed is basically the face of it, is the consumer-facing product, the media side of it where content is created and people come and consume that content.

Colin White: Now it’s at 120 million unique users a month – that’s obviously very impressive. But from a geographic perspective, is that mainly in India now? What percentage of that is global versus the India market?

Vinay Singhal: So we started with an American audience being the highest number of people who used to be part of that community that we created and somehow most of those communities that we brought onward were also very English-speaking first – Canada, UK, Australia. So when we were starting up we were we were all about that global audience. And I think that DNA has remained always there. So even today, while India has become our largest market – we are 50 million users out of 120 that we do – 50 million makes us the largest new-age media company in India. But we still do more than 40 million North Americans which is US and Canada every month on the platform – 35 million being from US and 5 million from Canada. Huge amounts of people are coming in every month from the UK as well, around 8 to 10 million. And 2 to 3 million coming in from Australia as well. So obviously it’s a very global market.

Colin White: So what are your next steps for WittyFeed in the next couple of years?

Vinay Singhal: We started from a very small town in India, in the central part of India called Indore, and we have grown from here now all across India, and now in the US as well. I was just in the US for my first visit. I spent 10 days in New York and it was amazing. There we plan to expand all across the world. Now we have started our New York office, we have set up offices in Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore. We have set up offices in Singapore also. So the idea is we have a huge audience, and the audience now will even offer it to brands directly in terms of creating branded content for them, content marketing as a medium of reaching out to the audience is growing, and we have done it already in India because we understand the market and it’s easier for us here. Now we want to replicate it in the US and then in the European and Australian markets.

Colin White:  Okay, so that was my next question – what’s in it for brands? I’m guessing you’re referring mostly to consumer brands from an advertising perspective?

Vinay Singhal: Yes, consumer brands are the customers for us, brands like Coke, Pepsi, Reebok, Samsung, Panasonic. Most of these brands we’ve been working with them here in India, and Amazon Prime. We will replicate the same in the US now.

What we have to offer is very simple. When I was telling our story I said all three of us are engineers by background, so we have always understood technology and data a little better. Then we understand content, and again the DNA of our educational background came in where this is a content company to the outside world, but a technology and data company to the internal team. And we have always maintained that. See, it is not easy to create content for the American audience, for young Americans, sitting from a small town in India when you have never been to the US. And I think the knowledge and data made it possible for us where essentially when we create content we don’t leave it to the creative and gut feeling of the writer. Instead we feed him with a lot of data and we help him understand and decide what is that young American willing to consume right now? What is their appetite for content? What is that they are interested in?

And let me tell you if we were to believe our data, we would have predicted Mr. Trump’s victory literally six months in advance. It’s data that powers WittyFeed, and it’s data that we are offering to the brands as well. To give you a little bit of insight into the kind of data that we have: most people would believe that the young American or Indian audience is not so interested in politics. But let me tell you – they are. You just have to give them the right angle of it, and the right kind of political content, and they consume it like anything. There are more insights like this that we have discovered with our journey, with the young audience.

Colin White: Very interesting – so to close it out here, we’re reaching one last question I wanted to ask you was with the election scandals and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook is making a lot of changes to their algorithms in terms of how they serve up content. What effect are those changes going to have on your business, and how are you going to adapt?

Vinay Singhal: Huge, actually. Facebook algorithms have made a lot of companies shut down their shops. Little things happen, and then across the world a lot of small publishers are going away. One thing is for sure with Facebook – the publishers are not their priority anymore. But I would say that the publishers who can create great content, and their priority right now is creating meaningful conversations among their audience. If we can create content that serves that purpose for Facebook, you still have a game there. And more importantly I think as publishers we all need to start working on ways to distribute our content beyond Facebook and Google and the bigger giants.

And we are working continuously on that. We are working on a solution which might actually solve this problem all together for all the publishers in the world. As I said, we’re engineers, so we have a solution for everything!

Colin White: Alright! Thanks very much, this is Vinay Singhal, he’s the co-founder and CEO of WittyFeed – thanks very much for joining us today!

If you’re a brand and would like to learn more about WittyFeed, visit their site at www.wittyfeed.me.

And thank you for joining us for another Martech Minute. If you’d like a complimentary consultation about how to optimize your demand gen and marketing automation systems and processes, please contact us today.